Since Donald Trump’s return to the presidency, pupil journalists have been instrumental in masking his administration’s assaults on every thing from the gutting of the Department of Education, to the rollback of range and fairness initiatives, to the crackdown on free speech and tried deportation of worldwide college students talking out on Palestine. During this time of elevated repression, we stay proud—in addition to astonished—to be alone amongst nationwide information retailers in recurrently publishing pupil views. As the sources and alternatives for rising writers proceed to dwindle, it has by no means been extra essential to assist the subsequent technology of journalists.
Utah is the third-driest state in the United States. From the parched Colorado Plateau to the even drier Great Basin, it’s virtually all desert.
In highschool, I rowed with Utah’s solely membership crew crew. Each spring, we drove our boats to the Great Salt Lake—the solely place for miles with sufficient water to row on. The lake’s salty water stank of sulfur, which made every thing it touched stink too. Thousands of brine flies swarmed our docks. They’d carpet my arms so thickly that after I appeared down, I’d see extra flies than flesh.
But away from shore, I noticed magnificence throughout. The water stretched up to now in each route that I couldn’t see the land past. Unless the wind picked up, the lake lay flat, gleaming and blue. Mountains appeared to pierce its floor and clone themselves in the ripples beneath. They appeared like spinning tops—stretching from peaks to flared bases, then winnowing again to sharp factors.
I observed with awe how the lake teemed with life. I’d look down, and what I assumed had been floating flakes of sediment would start to swim. They had been brine shrimp: crustaceans that carry the Great Salt Lake’s ecosystem on their centimeter-long backs. Waterfowl stuffed the sky, diving to dip their beaks and spindly legs into my wake.
The 12 months I left for faculty, one of my sisters joined the crew crew. I’d hoped we might bond over rowing on the lake. But that November, a former teammate known as me. She mentioned our crew wouldn’t be rowing on the Great Salt Lake subsequent 12 months—that the crew would possibly by no means row on it once more. Utah was in a drought, and the lake had shriveled to its lowest ranges on document.
The shoreline had receded a lot that our docks had been unusable. Most of the boats had been hauled out of the water because it crept down their bows. The boats that remained lay beached in a dry marina—a ghost city the place, simply months earlier than, I’d rowed each afternoon.
The Great Salt Lake lies 20 miles northwest of my home in Salt Lake City. You see it everytime you have a look at the horizon: a streak of silver separating land and sky.
From its perch, the lake sustains all of northern Utah. Moisture evaporates from its floor and falls in the close by mountains (largely as snow, giving Utah fabulous snowboarding). Come spring, this water trickles by means of Utah’s valleys and returns to the lake. On its method, it hydrates the vegetation, animals, and other people alongside the close by Wasatch Front, house to Salt Lake City.
The first time I visited the Great Salt Lake, on a fifth-grade subject journey, it lined 1,700 sq. miles. Though I didn’t understand it but, that was half the measurement it had been 30 years earlier, when my mother was a fifth-grader. In the Nineteen Eighties, the lake unfold over 3,300 sq. miles—an space bigger than Rhode Island and Delaware mixed.
Now my youngest sisters are in fifth grade. And once more the lake has halved, dropping to 888 sq. miles in 2022. Without significant change, the Great Salt Lake will vanish inside my lifetime.
This would spell disaster for Utah. State lawmaker Joel Ferry instructed The New York Times that the Great Salt Lake’s disappearance would represent an “environmental nuclear bomb.” Water provides would dwindle, and ecosystems would perish—from the brine shrimp in the lake to the over 10 million migratory birds that refuel in its marshes every year. Utah’s inhabitants might vanish with them.
When Utah industrialized, mines started improperly dumping waste, which then leached into the lake, polluting it with heavy metals like arsenic. As a terminal lake, the Great Salt Lake has inlets however no retailers apart from evaporation. All the metals which have ever been poured into it have gathered in its lake mattress over time, with no method out.
Now retreating water ranges are exposing stretches of cracked, arsenic-laden lake mattress. Windstorms have begun to blow throughout the mattress, choosing up clouds of toxic mud. They carry it into the Wasatch Front, which is house to 2.6 million of Utah’s 3.4 million residents. Inhaling even strange mud will be devastating to well being, however arsenic-laced mud carries an additional hazard. As extra storms from the Great Salt Lake’s dried basin arrive, the air will flip poisonous. Millions of Utahans—together with my whole household—will breathe poison.
This mud received’t kill you in a single day, however the EPA hyperlinks it to “asthma, heart attacks, and premature death.” Similar disasters have occurred to different lakes, and close by cities haven’t fared effectively. After Owens Lake, a saline lake in California, dried up and poisonous mud storms began, cities alongside its coast emptied. The arid lake mattress stuffed the surrounding air with PM10—tiny particles which have critical well being results if inhaled. Owens Lake turned the nation’s largest single PM10 supply, spreading air pollution throughout the area. The Great Salt Lake is 15 instances bigger than Owens Lake ever was. Its collapse can be much more catastrophic.
It terrifies me to consider what is going to occur to my group if the Great Salt Lake vanishes. My youthful siblings all have extreme bronchial asthma, and two dwell with simply 60 p.c of regular lung capability.
When my brother visited the Great Salt Lake on his personal fifth-grade subject journey, his rowdy class kicked up mud on the lake shore, which plunged him right into a extreme bronchial asthma assault. Fortunately, he had his inhaler with him. But what is going to occur to my siblings if these mud storms invade Salt Lake City—and the air exterior our home? Will my brother be capable of survive in a spot the place he can barely breathe?
My household has the means to go away Utah, and if the lake dries up, I do know we are going to. That’s what occurred to the cities round Owens Lake: Those who might afford it fled. The much less lucky stayed and handled the penalties.
The subsequent few years will decide the Great Salt Lake’s destiny. Utah faces two choices: We can reply with apathy and watch as the lake disappears, together with many of Utah’s residents. Or we are able to get up to the hazard and enact substantive laws, provide water-conservation incentives, and acceptable cash to avoid wasting the lake.
Saving the Great Salt Lake received’t be straightforward. The University of Utah estimates that the quantity of water that flows into the lake should enhance by 33 p.c for it to achieve wholesome water ranges by the 2050s. This means Utahans must make sacrifices. We should curb municipal water use—by getting rid of water-intensive lawns, for instance.
Utah’s agriculture business, the largest client of water from the lake, should additionally cut back its consumption. It doubtless received’t do that by itself, so Utah’s Legislature should cross laws. And Utah’s authorities should tighten water-use laws round thirsty crops like alfalfa and make investments state funds to lease water rights again from agricultural teams in order that extra water can stream to the lake.
Such actions might be politically charged and economically pricey in the quick time period. But they are going to be sure that Utah, its folks, and its industries survive far into the future.
I fear that my siblings might by no means know the Utah I do know. My littlest sisters are 10 years youthful than me, and lots can change in a decade. Will they ever ski by means of lake-effect snow, or discover themselves enveloped in the good sunsets that may be seen solely whenever you’re rowing on the Great Salt Lake?
I pray they are going to. But greater than that, I depend on myself and different Utahans to take motion.
The proper to illustration: Members of Santa Ana Families for Fair Elections at an occasion launching a marketing campaign to broaden native noncitizen voting in September 2023.(Harbor Institute for Immigrant and Economic Justice)
The Case for Letting Noncitizens Vote
by Fatimah Azeem
Carlos Perea remembers listening to his mom’s tales about dodging immigration raids in the textile factories of Orange County, California.
“There was this interesting dynamic in Orange County at the time, being heavily anti-immigrant but relying on immigrant labor,” Perea mentioned. “It showed me how we’re treated as Mexicans, as undocumented people.”
Perea, a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient, got here to the United States at 14, becoming a member of his mom, who had immigrated a decade earlier. He arrived in Santa Ana simply as the George W. Bush administration launched sweeping office raids concentrating on undocumented staff throughout the nation. At the similar time, Los Angeles erupted in historic protests, together with “La Gran Marcha,” the place greater than half one million folks marched for immigrants’ rights. Just a few years later, Perea would change into concerned in the Dreamers motion, which challenged President Barack Obama’s mass deportation insurance policies.
In 2012, after years of stress, Obama enacted DACA by means of government motion. But the prospect of extra protecting pathways to citizenship for thousands and thousands of undocumented folks died in Congress and has by no means been revived. “A lot of these fights started to sharpen our politics,” mentioned Perea, now the government director of the Harbor Institute for Immigrant and Economic Justice. “Are we going to continue to have our immigrant communities be this chess piece for the Democratic Party or Republican special interests? Are we going to constantly be tossed around and gain no meaningful outcome?”
For hundreds of progressives in Santa Ana, the method ahead was clear: Power wanted to return from the backside up. Recognizing a “crisis of democracy” at the native stage, Perea and others in the Latino and Vietnamese communities of Santa Ana started campaigning for the proper to vote as noncitizens.
In November 2024, these efforts culminated in a measure on the Santa Ana poll that might prolong the proper to vote to noncitizens on the whole municipal elections by 2028. The first of its type to be proposed in Southern California, Measure DD finally failed by a margin of 59 to 41 p.c. Yet the final result wasn’t all unhealthy: “This was something people thought was impossible to even get on the ballot,” Perea recalled. “I think it speaks volumes that there were a large number of people in Santa Ana ready for noncitizen voting on our first try.”
Twenty-two localities in the United States already permit noncitizen voting of some type, together with San Francisco, Oakland, the District of Columbia, and a number of other cities and cities in Maryland and Vermont. Each of these municipalities has distinct legal guidelines governing noncitizen voting. Many permit solely lawful everlasting US residents to vote, and most restrict it to oldsters in school-board elections.
Measure DD was one of the boldest and most inclusive proposals thus far, with its definition of noncitizen encompassing everlasting residents, refugees, undocumented immigrants, DACA recipients, and people on faculty or work permits.
“We established a narrative—now people know what noncitizen voting is,” Perea mentioned. “It’s going to be our job now to make the case of presenting this as the North Star of the [immigrant-rights] movement. It’s going to be a tough battle, but we have nothing to lose.”
From the nation’s founding till 1926, 40 states at numerous instances allowed noncitizen immigrants to vote in native, state, or federal elections, based on Ron Hayduk, a professor of political science at San Francisco State University. “History flies in the face of this idea that immigrants never could or never should be voting—that it’s improper, that it’s unconstitutional, that it’s illegal. In fact, history shows that it’s the opposite,” Hayduk mentioned. “I like to say that it’s as American as apple pie and older than our national pastime, baseball.”
Noncitizen voting, then known as “alien suffrage,” was seen as a pathway to foster citizenship and integration. Millions of immigrants from Western and Northern Europe voted, typically advancing antislavery and pro-worker causes. But these legal guidelines started to vary as extra immigrants got here to the United States from Southern and Eastern Europe—Italians, Slovaks, and Jews—who had been typically seen as nonwhite or as related to socialist and anarchist ideologies.
Between 1840 and 1900, voter turnout in presidential elections was between 70 and 80 p.c of the eligible inhabitants. By 1924, nevertheless, voter turnout had plummeted to 49 p.c, coinciding with broader efforts to curtail each voting rights and immigration. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 marked the starting of these restrictive insurance policies; it was adopted by limits on immigration that decreased annual admissions from as many as 800,000 to 150,000 folks. These adjustments—together with restrictive election reforms resembling state ballot taxes, literacy checks, and felon-disenfranchisement legal guidelines—restricted democratic and progressive prospects for many years. Arkansas was the final state to eradicate alien suffrage in 1926.
Immigrant voting was restored in New York City in a restricted method throughout the civil-rights period, led by African American and Latino activists as half of a bigger motion for group management in school-board elections. In the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s, the sanctuary motion impressed the restoration of noncitizen voting in Maryland.
In 1993, present Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), then a legislation professor, wrote a seminal law-journal article that put immigrant voting again on the map and helped Takoma Park, Maryland, enact noncitizen-voting legal guidelines. “He said at the time, ‘Immigrant rights are like the civil rights of the day.’ And by that logic, noncitizen voting is the suffrage movement of our time,” Hayduk mentioned.
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In early 2023, pushed by Santa Ana’s rising immigrant inhabitants (based on county knowledge, 29.5 p.c of the metropolis’s residents are foreign-born, largely from Asia and Central America), the marketing campaign to revive noncitizen voting discovered its footing. A coalition known as Santa Ana Families for Fair Elections spearheaded the marketing campaign, with assist from the ACLU of Southern California.
Mayor Valerie Amezcua strongly opposed Measure DD, citing considerations about the bills of a brand new voting system and dear litigation. Additionally, two City Council members, backed by the police union and the Police Officers Association, opposed the measure, and one progressive council member who was working for reelection known as it too radical a step.
The coalition pushed again and seized on the centuries-old American slogan “No taxation without representation,” framing noncitizen voting as each a democratic and an financial problem. Immigrants in Santa Ana contribute greater than $117 million in state and native taxes but haven’t any political say in how these funds are spent.
“Robust and inclusive political participation leads to more diverse representative bodies, making representatives more responsive to all constituents and fostering more effective public policy,” Hayduk mentioned. Studies on immigrant-voting applications in the United States, in addition to world research on noncitizen voting in Sweden, Norway, and Latin America, have discovered constructive outcomes in selling naturalization and immigrant integration. Over 40 nations on practically each continent permit for some kind of noncitizen voting in native, regional, and even nationwide elections.
The opposition to Measure DD raised greater than $1 million, whereas the grassroots marketing campaign in its favor operated on a price range of simply $10,000. Perea mentioned that this stage of expenditure on council races or poll initiatives was “unprecedented” in Santa Ana. “[It] speaks volumes as to who feels threatened by immigrants and refugees having a seat at the table,” Hernandez mentioned.
As Measure DD failed in November 2024, voters in eight states—Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Wisconsin—handed constitutional amendments to ban noncitizen voting. The proponents of these measures, like Michael Meredith, a Republican state consultant in Kentucky, argued that they had been a solution to “get ahead of” potential adjustments to native charters that may enfranchise noncitizens in the future and to safeguard elections for eligible voters.
A surge in election skepticism and anti-immigrant rhetoric accompanied the amendments, pushed partly by then-President-elect Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson. Both perpetuated false claims about noncitizens voting in federal elections. In September, Johnson threatened to close down Congress if the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act— a measure requiring proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections—was not handed.
Even so, the struggle to broaden voting rights continues. Elsewhere in the state, the California Local Voting Coalition continues to push for native noncitizen-voting initiatives statewide. Similar campaigns are underway throughout the state and the relaxation of the nation. Meanwhile, the authorized problem to New York City’s noncitizen-voting legislation is about to obtain a closing ruling in the coming months.
“I think [Trump] is going to radicalize a lot of our community,” Perea mentioned. “Many folks are going to become active. If the extreme right is saying the most outrageous things about immigrants, we are going to have to push for the most radical idea.”
Learning by coronary heart: Students attend faculty in an out of doors classroom in Gaza, November 18, 2025.(Abdalhkem Abu Riash / Anadolu by way of Getty Images)
“We Deserve Life”: Students Speak Out From Gaza
by Tareq Alsourani and William Liang
At daybreak in southern Gaza, Hasan Barghouth wakes to the name of the muezzin. He steps out of the tent the place his household lives and makes his well past rows of plastic shelters to the shade of an olive tree, the place he has arrange a wood desk. The floor crawls with bugs, however right here he escapes the mess of each day tent life. He brings a laptop computer with out a battery, wired to a photo voltaic panel. (“Something only people in Gaza know how to do,” he says.) Before the warmth of the solar turns into insufferable, Hasan works by means of his classes.
As of May 2025, based on UN companies, a minimum of 95 p.c of Gaza’s faculties had been incapacitated or destroyed, and greater than 5,400 college students, 261 lecturers, and 95 college professors have been killed, with the numbers rising each day. Higher training has been, in the phrases of the France24 information community, “wiped off the map,” as all 17 of Gaza’s universities lie in ruins. More than a decade in the past, the Palestinian scholar Karma Nabulsi coined the phrase scholasticide to explain the deliberate dismantling of the establishments, folks, and processes that make training doable. Today, Gaza is the most full manifestation of that time period.
Hasan must be getting ready for the Tawjihi, a high-stakes examination that determines faculty placement in Palestine, however the struggle has postponed the check indefinitely. Though variations of the Tawjihi are nonetheless administered exterior the Gaza Strip, high-schooler Anas AlSous, like tens of hundreds of different college students, has not been capable of take the examination. According to the UN, greater than 76,000 college students have missed the check throughout the previous two tutorial years, and UNICEF reviews that just about 40,000 college students in Gaza missed it in 2024 alone. A small on-line session this 12 months reached about 1,500 candidates.
Gaza’s shortages are all too acquainted: electrical energy, water, meals, and—critically for college kids—Internet entry. Many stroll miles to discover a sign to obtain lectures and be a part of classes, gathering in on-line networks of college students who attempt to protect a way of highschool group. Notebooks are so arduous to return by that some college students resolve their math issues on the backs of flyers. Many of Hasan’s friends have given up on their classes, as an alternative spending their days in the seek for meals. “They drop their pens,” he mentioned, “to either eat or get shot.”
The proper to training is assured below human-rights treaties like the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Article 50 of the Fourth Geneva Convention additionally obliges an occupying energy to facilitate the correct working of all establishments dedicated to the care and training of youngsters. But Israel rejects each, claiming that solely the narrower framework of humanitarian legislation governing energetic hostilities applies in Gaza, recasting the systematic dismantling of Gaza’s training system as the collateral injury of struggle. Even below humanitarian legislation, Israel is required to differentiate civilians from army targets and to protect primary civilian infrastructure, but it has proven no proportionality or restraint in its assault. Chandni Desai, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, wrote that such concentrating on is “a key feature of genocide.”
Eighteen-year-old Menna Abu Imara remembers the morning her education ended on October 7, 2023. “In a few seconds, everything was paused. The war started, and schools closed their doors,” she mentioned. Within days, her home was bombed, killing her father, uncles, and grandparents. She survived, severely wounded, alongside along with her mom and siblings. Menna has not accomplished eleventh or twelfth grade. She earned a scholarship overseas however then misplaced it—nobody can go away Gaza, and even when she might, Menna can not journey alone, as her proper arm stays disabled.
“I feel like I am betraying the dead by pretending life goes on, as if the simple act of studying is a kind of lie,” mentioned 18-year-old Yara Nasser, who cowrote the guide Gaza Held in Time with Tareq AlSourani. “How can I scribble down equations when my neighbor’s child was buried yesterday? But to give it up feels like surrender. Like we’re giving up the future.”
Students instructed us that hours as soon as used to put in writing essays or put together for exams at the moment are spent ready in line for meals and water. “My ultimate goal of securing admission to a university turned into a mission of survival,” mentioned AlSous.
In weeks of conversations by way of e-mail and letters, we’ve heard accounts from dozens of college students in Gaza and in exile which might be uniformly grim. Yet many proceed to pursue their training, apply for scholarships, dream of careers, and picture futures understanding full effectively they could by no means attain them. They perceive that to maintain learning is to insist on a future the struggle is attempting to disclaim them.
The phrase scholasticide captures this double actuality: the destruction of lecture rooms and college, but in addition the theft of alternative. It is a method of guaranteeing that Palestinians can not rebuild, can not produce professionals, can not narrate their very own story. But even amid exhaustion and hunger, college students cling to their books and laptops in an assertion that life itself remains to be doable.
Under an olive tree, Hasan explains why he research—why, when the meals strains eat up a lot of the day and the possibilities of utilizing his classes are slim, he insists on persevering with his training. His reply is transient. “We study,” he says, “not because we have the privilege to dream, but because it’s the only way we can scream that we deserve life.”
Adelaide Parker
Adelaide Parker is a 2025 Puffin pupil writing fellow specializing in training for The Nation. She is a author and pupil at Harvard College from Salt Lake City, Utah, majoring in social research and philosophy. She works as a co-op for The Boston Globe.
Fatimah Azeem
Fatimah Azeem is a 2024 Puffin writing fellow centered on racial justice for The Nation. She is a journalist and a latest graduate of the University of Texas at Dallas, the place she earned a BS in psychology with minors in political science and artistic writing. While at UTD, she served as editor in chief of The Mercury, along with her work being acknowledged in the Texas Tribune, Inside Higher Ed, and Medill on the Hill; on NPR’s All Things Considered and CBS; and by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Tareq AlSourani
Tareq AlSourani is a Palestinian highschool pupil from Gaza primarily based mostly in Montreal and the co-author of the guide Gaza, Held in Time.
William Liang
William Liang is a highschool author and opinion columnist for The Hill and relies in San Francisco.
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